Freedom & Bowlegs

A week's sampling of the state of U.S. race relations.

P: In Atlanta's Wheat Street Baptist Church, Henry Wallace spoke to an unsegregated audience of 3,000 Negroes and whites. City officials refused to interfere. Said K.K.K. Grand Dragon Samuel Green: "We'll see them later."

P: Holding its annual meeting in Baltimore, the Southern Medical Association firmly specified who might attend: "White physicians, white faculty members of medical schools, white personnel of health departments, white hospital residents and interns, white medical students."

P: The University of Nebraska student council demanded that Nebraska quit the Big Six athletic conference unless the rule prohibiting Negroes from participating in athletic events is revoked.

P: In Durham, N.C., two semiprofessional football teams played to a 6-to-6 tie in the Piedmont Tobacco Bowl, the first football game in the South between a team of Negroes and a team of whites.

P: In Memphis, Mayor James J. Pleasants Jr. bent a dutiful ear toward Boss Crump, announced that the Negro and white races would have to see the Freedom Train separately. Freedom Train officials canceled the stop. But Atlanta's Mayor William Hartsfield refused to sanction such segregation: "I do not see how anybody can draw a color line through freedom and justice."

P: Arguing for the white primary before the U.S. circuit court of appeals in Baltimore, South Carolina Democrats insisted that their party was like a country club: it could exclude Republicans, women, lawyers, or bowlegged men if it chose. A Negro "has no more right to vote in the Democratic primaries in South Carolina than to vote in the election of officers . . . for the Colonial Dames of America."

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